Metalcore as any fan of metal knows, is a genre full of love and hate, good and bad, and a lot of 'samey' music. Project For A Better Dream doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel, but no band really does this on their first release, let alone an EP. However Project For A Better Dream takes inspiration from the best bands in metalcore and combines those sources to make some solid music. Their latest EP It's Just In My Head absolutely sums this up.
The first thing I noticed is that the vocalist really reminds me a lot of Daniel Weyandt from Zao, which is a nice thing because many new metalcore bands take vocal inspiration from the likes of August Burns Red and Unearth, so it's nice to see a band take inspiration from one of the best 'founding fathers' of modern metalcore. (On a side note Zao was one of the very first metal bands I listened to so they've struck a chord with me there.)
The next thing I thoroughly enjoy is the guitar riffs and solos. they are very reminiscent of early As I Lay Dying work (also a great source of inspiration). The album begins with 'The Storm' which features a pretty awesome solo from the get go and the solo on the end of 'Prison', subsequently the end of the album, is my favorite and ends the song off well, although it does leave you with this high energy that is a little ruined by the fact that the song ends rather abruptly, but in some way that's a good thing because it makes you want to restart the EP right away and get right back into that beginning solo.
The drumming is pretty solid, I hate to keep pinning these guys solo on their inspirations but I do get an early Jordan Mancino feel from the entire album, but that's definitely a good thing in my book.
I want to say their is an overall theme to the albums lyrics both because of the band name and the album title and how that correlates to the bands name, but I wasn't able to find the lyrics for the songs, so I'll just have to hope for that assumption to be correct until I can read the lyrics.
Project For A Better Dream holds great promise. I'm really excited to see what they can do on an LP if that happens sometime soon. The production I imagine was paid for out of the bands pocket and with that considered it's actually really good production. I also mentioned a plenty that they take great influence from some of the masters of modern metalcore, and while that's good they could use a little sound developing of their own. They aren't generic sounding, but they also don't stand out enough yet. So again I'm really interested to see how the band holds up in the future and I have high hopes for them.
Their EP is entirely free so you have no excuses to not be listening to it by now. You can download it directly from their facebook here. While your there go ahead and give them a like, bands need likes in order to get booked for shows because venues have started looking at how 'popular' you are to determine whether you get booked or not.
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